15. It’ll Hold
It’ll Hold
Summer
The second Jackson leaves the room, silence crashes down around me so heavily it almost hurts.
The lock clicks behind him and then there's nothing.
No footsteps lingering outside the door.
No voices drifting through the walls. Just silence and the faint hum of air moving through the vents while I stand frozen in front of the mirror, staring at a girl I barely recognize.
I can't stop looking at her.
Dark hair falls over my shoulders in soft waves, still warm from the dryer, almost black beneath the muted light.
It changes everything. My skin looks paler against it, my eyes somehow greener, the shadows beneath them deeper.
I look older. Harder. Like someone has reached inside me and peeled away the last part of me that still looked familiar.
My stomach turns.
My hand lifts toward my reflection before stopping halfway, my fingers trembling in mid-air. I can't make myself touch it. It doesn't feel like my hair anymore. It feels like something that's been attached to me, forced onto me until I can't separate where I end and it begins.
Just like her.
The words keep circling, refusing to leave me alone.
There… Just like her.
Who?
Who was he talking about?
My pulse starts climbing again as I stare at my reflection, searching my own face for someone I'll never find.
Was she a girlfriend? A wife? Someone he loved?
Someone he killed? My thoughts chase each other so fast they barely make sense anymore until all I can see is the look on his face while he stood behind me with the hairdryer in his hand.
It was something that looked almost like grief.
A breath catches painfully in my throat as another memory pushes its way forward.
The way he'd watched the color develop. The way his expression kept shifting almost imperceptibly while he looked at me, like he wasn't seeing me at all but comparing me to somebody else, measuring me against a memory I'd never be able to compete with.
My skin crawls.
What happened to her?
The question settles over me like ice water because nothing about Jackson suggests happy endings. Nothing about this place suggests survival. I think about the missing girls. The newspaper headlines. The casual way he'd spoken about breaking me, as though it wasn't a threat but a promise.
What if she didn't survive him either?
For one horrible second, I can almost see her standing where I am now, dark hair falling over her shoulders while Jackson watched her with those same distant eyes, and the image is so vivid it sends nausea crashing into the back of my throat.
Then, absurdly, my gaze catches on something else.
My eyebrows.
They're still lighter than my hair, still stubbornly auburn beneath the dark strands framing my face, and for one completely insane second I catch myself wishing he’d dyed those too because now everything looks unfinished.
Uneven. Like someone started painting over me and walked away before they'd finished the job.
The thought hits me so hard a breathless laugh escapes before I can stop it. I actually laugh.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I'm standing in a mountain compound owned by a psychopath who kidnapped me at gunpoint after threatening to murder my friends, and somehow my brain has decided this is what deserves my attention. Not the locks. Not the guns. Not the fact that I'm trapped. My eyebrows.
The laugh dies as quickly as it came, leaving something hollow behind.
Maybe that's how people survive this. Maybe the mind reaches for tiny, ordinary problems because the real ones are too enormous to carry all at once.
It's easier to worry about uneven eyebrows than accept that Jackson Moore has stolen another piece of me, and that somewhere out there Jacob still thinks the girl he loves has hair the color of fire.
That thought hurts enough to make me tear my eyes away from the mirror.
I sink onto the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping beneath my weight as I stare blankly at the opposite wall and force myself to breathe through the panic clawing at the inside of my chest. I'd already searched the room while they'd left me alone.
Every drawer. Every cupboard. Every inch of the bathroom.
There was nothing. No loose vents, no broken glass, nothing heavy enough to swing or sharp enough to stab with.
Jackson had stripped the room back to exactly what he wanted me to have.
My fingers drift absentmindedly to the waistband of the joggers, twisting one of the drawstrings around them while my thoughts betray me and wander somewhere they have no business going.
Jacob.
He loved my hair.
Not in the casual way men tell women they look pretty, but with the quiet fascination he had for things he never realized he was paying attention to.
Sometimes we'd be watching television and I'd feel his fingers disappear into it without him even noticing he'd done it.
Other times he'd wrap a strand loosely around his hand while I lay against his chest, completely lost in whatever was going through that complicated head of his.
Once the afternoon sun had caught it through the kitchen window, and he'd looked at me with dilated pupils before quietly muttering, Looks like fucking fire.
The memory steals the air from my lungs.
Grief climbs so quickly into my throat I have to look down before it swallows me whole, my fingers tightening around the drawstring as though it's the only thing anchoring me to the room.
They stop moving.
My eyes follow them, as realization dawns.
The cord.
My pulse stutters.
Slowly, I ease one end free until the entire drawstring slides into my hand.
It's longer than I'd expected. Woven. Strong too.
I pull it tight between both fists, watching it stretch without snapping, then pull harder, testing the fibers, my breathing slowing as panic quietly gives way to something else.
Maybe it would break. Maybe it wouldn't. It only has to hold once.
My mind races ahead before I can stop it, piecing together movements instead of memories now.
From behind. Across the throat. If I pull back with everything I've got and don't let go.
I don't know if it'd kill someone. I don't need it to.
I just need enough time. Long enough to make them let go of a gun. Long enough to run.
Something shifts so suddenly inside my chest it almost frightens me.
Hope.
I push myself to my feet before I've even realized I'm moving, wrapping the cord tightly around my hands and pulling it taut again, imagining the resistance, the weight of another body, the desperate fight that would follow.
“It'll hold,” I whisper. “It’s got to fucking hold.” The words sound strange in the silence, but hearing them out loud changes something.
For the first time since the helicopter landed, my thoughts stop circling helplessly and begin moving in a straight line.
A plan.
Jackson and Donnie are both a lot bigger than me. They’re stronger, too. But they’re arrogant, and arrogant men make mistakes because they never believe someone like me is capable of hurting someone like them.
I tighten my grip.
Wrap.
Pull.
Lean back.
Don't stop.